


The Teacher's Tale

by MercuryGray



Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: Domestic Fluff, F/M, Houseguests, Keeping House, Married Couple, Married Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-15
Updated: 2017-07-15
Packaged: 2018-12-02 12:07:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11509110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MercuryGray/pseuds/MercuryGray
Summary: It isn't every day that Emma has a houseguest to entertain, and the possibility of this one is making her nervous. What will one of Henry's oldest friends think of her - and she of him?





	The Teacher's Tale

_But from the parlor of the inn_

_A pleasant murmur smote the ear,_

_Like water rushing through a weir:_

_Oft interrupted by the din_

_Of laughter and of loud applause,_

_And, in each intervening pause,_

_The music of a violin…_

 

_...Around the fireside at their ease_

_There sat a group of friends, entranced_

_With the delicious melodies_

_Who from the far-off noisy town_

_Had to the wayside inn come down,_

_To rest beneath its old oak-trees._

Tales of a Wayside Inn, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

* * *

 

Henry observed the nervous progress of his wife around the parlor and decided that it would not do. “Emma, dearest, _please_ ,” he begged, catching her around the waist and stilling her for a moment. “If I promise you that John won’t care hide or hair for the dust on the mantle do you promise to _stop_?”

 

“But he’s your _friend_ ,” Emma replied, clearly still troubled by the thought that she would be entertaining and the house might not meet expectations.

 

“He didn’t care a fig for clean mantles while we were at school, and I _promise_ you, darling, that he hasn’t changed in ten years. He’s a ...bachelor used to rented rooms and boarding houses - this will seem a palace to him, dusty mantle or no.” Henry planted a kiss on his wife’s cheek and looked reassuringly at her. “Now when I let go do you promise not to attack another surface with that featherduster?”

 

Emma looked at him as though she meant to argue, but she nodded. Tentatively, Henry withdrew, and Emma stayed put, lingering in the shadow of his body. “He’ll love this place, and he’ll love you,” he added again. “So there is nothing to be worried about.” She nodded, for her own benefit, Henry thought, and he pressed a kiss to her forehead. “Good girl. Did you find time to finish with my coat?”

 

She nodded again, this time for him. “Button’s been fixed and I mended the cuff, too,” she said, following him to the front hall of the parsonage so she could help him into his coat and brush his hat for him. “I wish you’d said the elbows are getting thin, or I would have bought some cloth to patch it while I was in town.”

 

“I’ll manage,” Henry said, kissing her cheek again. “You worry too much.”

 

“Easy for you to say, when you’re not subject to the parish gossip,” his wife replied. “If I let you out in a coat with holes at the elbows they’ll say you’ve married a good-for-nothing southern slattern.”

 

“And when they do I have just the sermon for next Sunday,” Henry shot back.

 

That, at least, made her smile, a little contented.  “Go - or you’ll miss his coach! I promise I won’t ...flutter myself into a panic while you’re gone.”

 

Henry fixed his hat on and stepped out into the street, wrapping the coat a little tighter against a sudden gust of autumn air and proceeded down the street towards the center of town and the cross-roads that served for the stagecoaches coming from Boston out to Williamstown. His mind was only partially in his walk, the other part still at home, watching Emma fuss and and flutter over the arrangement of her small collection of doilies and the pattern of her china.

 

He knew it hadn’t been easy for her, coming to his little parish in Massachusetts. She had been raised to gentler things than being a parson’s wife and the business of making a home did not come easily to her, but she was managing as best she could. That was why she was worrying over this buisness of John’s visit - it was a chance to prove her mettle as a housekeeper, even if it was only by playing host to an old friend of her husband’s from seminary for a few days. He was so absorbed he hardly noticed the passengers already waiting in the shade.

 

“Henry Hopkins, as I live and breathe!” A tall figure unfolded itself from the porch of the house that served as the stagecoach stop, rising to its full six feet and holding its arms out in welcome. “I thought perhaps you’d abandoned me to the wilds of the local hostelry.”

 

“And miss the chance to drag you home to drink with me all night?” Henry asked with a smile, throwing his arms around his friend and holding him close. “What do you take me for, John Sudbury?”

 

“Now, what will your wife say?” Sudbury asked with a smile, pulling away from the embrace and inspecting Henry from shoe to crown. “Good grief, there’s a phrase I never thought I’d say. ‘Your wife.’  We’ve gotten old. Speaking of which,” he asked, peering around from underneath his cap, “Where is the lady? I half expected she’d be here.”

 

“At home, making sure the whole place is spotless,” Henry said. His friend rolled his eyes at that.

 

“Heavens, is that so? I hope you told her I’m a right mess and it shan’t be spotless when I’ve left.”

 

“She didn’t want to hear it.”

 

“Her loss.” Sudbury smiled. “She seems to be keeping you well,” he said, glancing at Henry’s waistcoat. “You’re not starving, I think.”

 

“She is, in her own words, a passable cook,” Henry admitted. Cooking was not among Emma’s crowning virtues, but her limited repertoire was growing daily, and they did not eat any burned or cold as often as they had when they had first set up housekeeping. “We do not starve - and neither will you, while you’re here. I told her to cook for five. But enough about me - how are you? Your letter didn’t say in more than two words.”

 

John shrugged as they began the walk back through town, carpetbag at his side. “Same as ever - confirmed old bachelor and likely to remain so. Still teaching, for all the good it will do creation and me. Is it better, in the college?”

 

“Than boys of twelve?” Henry had to laugh. “They don’t change much in seven years, John. Did we?”

 

John acknowledged this with a resigned smile and a sigh, nodding in agreement and following Henry down the street in companionable silence until Henry turned towards the fence that separated their modest little lot from the street. Emma was standing on the porch, shading her eyes against the sun as she watched the street. “Hello, dearest,” he said with a kiss on the cheek. “I have retrieved our guest. Emma, my good friend, John Sudbury. John, my wife, Emma.”

 

John, ever the dramatic, swept a courtly bow in his traveling coat and caught Emma’s hand to kiss it, eliciting a small sound of surprise from Emma. “Mrs. Hopkins, may I say that it is truly an honor - and your husband does you no credit at all, you are far lovelier than he described in his letters.”

 

“He warned me _you_ were a flatterer, Mr. Sudbury,” Emma replied with an arch, amused smile, and John grinned.

 

“I like her.”

 

“Sudbury, stop flirting with my wife and get inside,” Henry groused affectionately, letting Emma lead the way up the front steps and into the front hall.

 

“Do you have a sister, by chance, Mrs. Hopkins?” John asked roguishly, following the party past where Henry had laid his carpetbag and into the parlor, allowing Emma to take his hat and coat back out into the hall while he sat down and made a fuss of arranging the tails of his coat on her small settee.

 

“Indeed I do - Alice, some three years younger. Though I don’t think she’ll do you much good, Mr. Sudbury,” she reported from the hall. “She is these six months past engaged -- to a banker.”

 

John pulled a face of mock despair. “Rich, I expect.”

 

“Very,” Emma confirmed with a grin of her own, returning to the parlor. “My sister loves the finer things in life.”

 

John sighed. “Alas for us poor bachelors, then.”

 

“I’ve tea in the kitchen, if you’ve a mind for it, dear,” Emma offered, lingering at her husband’s shoulder. He looked up at her, momentarily confused.

 

“Will you not join us?”

 

“In a minute.” She glanced over at John, peering with great interest through the window. “Something outside, Mr. Sudbury?”

 

John pulled his attention back indoors, settling back into his chair. “I was only admiring the apple tree outside the window, Mrs. Hopkins. Does it fruit, d’you know? I spent the whole ride from Boston going past every color autumn has to offer and I declare nothing would set me up as wonderfully as an apple.”

 

“Nothing worth eating, as far as I know,” Emma replied. “The few I’ve pulled off the tree have all been wormy. But there’s a cherry out back that gave a little fruit this spring- hardly enough for jam, but perhaps next year…” She trailed off, doubtless remembering, as Henry was, the smell of burnt sugar and the tremendous burn her last try at jam had produced. “Perhaps you’d like to take your tea outside,” she suggested, sensing in her guest more energy than her little sitting room could possibly contain. “The weather’s still fine, and we’ll bring out some chairs and the table and set them under the trees, and you can admire the color from there.”

 

“What a fine idea,” John said, rising quickly from his chair and linking it over one arm. “Henry, give me a hand while your charming helpmeet goes to fetch the tea.”

 

There was a momentary flurry as John grabbed chairs and Henry the little tea table, catching the door so the two of them might proceed outside to commence setting up shop under the tree in the back garden, the deficiencies of Emma’s struggling little garden covered, for the moment, by a fine carpet of russet and gold leaves from the maple over the neighbor’s fence.

 

“Henry Hopkins, you are a damn liar,” Sudbury said quietly, setting the chairs down and bringing himself close to his friend’s ear as he glanced back up at the house, following Emma’s progress through the kitchen window. Henry stood up and wondered what he’d done to deserve the pronouncement, his gaze following John’s to the kitchen window.“You said your wife was pretty - you didn't say you’d married an _angel_! Poets would weep for a woman like that, man! There's no earthly way that woman was a nurse.”

 

“War makes strange creatures of us all,” Henry said with a smile, glad that of all things, that was John’s only concern. “And Emma was most certainly a nurse.” _And a very capable one,_ he wanted to add, but that felt a little like gilding the lily. His smile slipped a little as he saw his friend’s face. “John Sudbury, what are you smiling about?”

 

“Oh, nothing,” John said, sitting back in his chair with a grin. “I was only thinking of the form for a wedding. Do you remember how we had to debate on what was the chief of the reasons for wedlock? Marriage," John said, sitting back in his chair, to recite "Is first ordained for the procreation of children-"

 

"John..."

 

"And second as a remedy against sin, and third - only third - to avoid fornication..."

 

Henry saw where this was going. "John!"

 

"So I would _hope_ that you are giving that mattress of yours a thorough exercise every night, Henry, because she is far too lovely to let your immortal soul pass up an opportunity to do all three."  At this Henry launched himself across the yard and into the leaves, taking his friend with him in a boyish tangle of limbs that soon turned into a wrestling match that would have made the fiercest of backwoodsmen proud.

 

It wasn’t, perhaps, that he was angry, only embarrassed - both that John would suggest the thing or that he was, in his own fashion, right. In school he had always been the troublemaker, caught out of bed skylarking in places he should not have been, a trickster with a new trick every week. Trouble did not seem to stick to him, though it followed him everywhere, and there was always more than one eager-eyed miss mooning after him. Of the two of them, Henry had always privately thought that it would be John who married first, but perhaps the itinerant life of a bachelor teacher suited his free and easy personality better than marriage did.  Henry had always been too sober a student to try any of John’s tricks, and John was laughing at him for it, as only a friend could get away with, reminding him in the bargain how much holier-than-thou he’d been about such things in his youth. (But it was true - he’d married Emma before his sins could get the better of the both of them.)

 

"Henry, what on earth..." Emma descended into the ruckus with wide eyes, the two men stopping only when she appeared on the porch, caught dead to rights acting like the boys they had once been. "Are you intent on breaking my chairs or your necks or both?" she asked, her hands full of the wide, black-lipped tea-tray.

 

They scrambled to their feet, men of thirty once more, duly chastised and dusting their knees. "My fault, Mrs. Hopkins," John apologized. "Your husband was defending your honor - much impugned by me, sadly."

 

"Indeed," Emma observed with an interested eye and a look at her husband that decreed he would tell her of it later or face consequences. “Now, if I leave this here do you promise not to break it? The teapot was a gift from Henry’s mother and I find I’m rather partial to it.”

 

The two men righted their chairs and the fallen tea-table and talk moved to gentler subjects as Emma brought out another chair to join them, asking John about his students back in Boston and how his journey here had treated him. They retreated back inside for dinner, a roast that Emma had been carefully nursing all afternoon, and John regaled them with tales from his school, the larks that schoolboys everywhere are prone to.

 

Henry found himself listening more than anything, content to sit back and let Emma and John carry the conversation, as were their wonts. He was a master storyteller, and she a master audience, bred to the post since she was old enough to flutter a fan. He might complain that John was a flirt, but there was something satisfying in watching one’s wife laugh and smile at the antics of one’s best friend, knowing, as only her husband could, that this was not idle flattery but genuine amusement. Eventually John roped him back in, asking his opinion on a book he was now teaching his students that had consumed many of their hours in earlier days.

 

When she left to do the dishes, they were in the thick of a conversation on the finer points of some German philosopher whose name Emma did not recognize, shooting arguments back and forth over glasses of a bottle of port she thought had come from her father, happy as a pair could be. Henry did not smile enough for Emma’s tastes, at least on his own - but in that way, this visit had been good for him. He had not stopped smiling since John had arrived.

 

He’d been hesitant, about inviting him to visit, thinking that she would not like the strain that a houseguest would provide, but it was good for him, she thought, to have the company of another mind besides her own. The fall term was only just starting, and his current crop of students were not quite so familiar to him as to invite them over to dinner, as was becoming his habit. He was more comfortable than she had seen him in months, since their last visit to the Fosters. He had played chess with Jed and let baby Eli sit on his knee and play with his pocket watch and looked so content doing it that Emma hated that she could not have these things at home for him, too. But she could invite a college friend to call, and serve tea under the apple tree, and let her husband fight for her honor - whatever that meant.

 

“What were you arguing about?” she asked that night after the lights had been turned down, the house locked up, and their guest firmly installed in the second, tiny bedroom under a heap of quilts. “Outside,” she specified, the whole evening having devolved into one great debate.

 

Henry tried not to smile, the memory of it now mellowed to a softer tone after the liberal application of a good meal and a good wine. “He was being uncouth.”

 

It was an interesting choice of words, even for him. “Try me.”

 

“He hoped I was being thorough in my duties as a husband,” Henry related with a smile that could not decide to be amused or annoyed. “And reminding me, in his own oblique way, that I was ...sometimes a little severe on him for being receptive to the idea of...being thorough.” He paused.  “I think he was a little jealous, to tell the truth - You’re quite his type.  I...I always thought he’d be the first to marry; the girls liked him a little better at school than they did me.”

 

“He does seem to have that effect,” she observed, getting a little shove and a smile for her troubles. “I liked him, for whatever that is worth. He makes you laugh.” Henry seemed surprised by this development, but took it in his stride. “Is that why you invited him here - to persuade him to the cause of matrimony?”

 

“Not in the least. Though I do think he was tempted,” Henry reported. “He approves of you, in his own way.”

 

Emma surveyed her husband and then smiled.

 

“Why? What did you say?” she asked, climbing leisurely into bed and moving the sheets aside so she might sit astride her husband, her pose and the position in which it left her anatomy, and his, provocative and dangerous, her nightdress rucked up artfully around her legs.

 

“I said you’re the worst temptation since Bathsheba on the rooftop,” Henry said with a serious smile, catching her hands and trying to hold his expression before she made them both break into laughter.

 

“Is that so?” She snaked her hips a little, smiling and biting at her bottom lip as his smile dropped for a moment and his eyes closed in pleasure. He sat up, moving her back a little so he might wrap his arms around her shoulders and kiss her. “The worst?”

 

“The very worst,” he repeated affectionately, kissing her lips, her chin, her jaw, the soft shell of her ear. “He asked when we were going to have children,” Henry murmured. “I assured him we were trying.”

 

“Are we?” She asked, shifting her body a little against him. “Are we trying?”

 

“We can be,” Henry said with a sly smile. “He seemed to be of the opinion we should be trying harder.”

 

She let her laughter answer that, not caring who she woke.

**Author's Note:**

> This is an old piece that I decided to polish up and publish, so my apologies for the somewhat meandering, distracted tone.
> 
> Ever since learning that the real Henry Hopkins went on after the war to become a college president (no really) I am totally in love with the idea of Henry the college theology professor and his equally charming wife with their house in town and their books and dinners for new students. I also really, really like the idea of someone who knows Henry really well trolling him a little for being a churchman and having such a pretty spouse. (I also just really like writing rakish, trouble-making school-friends.)
> 
> The epigram, as well as the name Sudbury, are borrowed from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. I think in the original idea for this story there was going to be more of the Tales of A Wayside Inn, but alas, how that was going to fit in has been forgotten.


End file.
